If we are going to intervene, there will have to be rules Fetishising sovereignty is a dictators' charter, but Martini interventionism would be worse
Jonathan Freedland Saturday March 8, 2003 The Guardian
The good doctor has spoken but it still looks like war. Even though Hans Blix talked yesterday of "active, even proactive" cooperation by the Iraqis, the American resolve is clear. Everything about George Bush's full-dress news conference on Thursday night - the grand location, the grave voice, the sombrely respectful press corps - suggested a last address to the nation, on the eve of conflagration.
As the president stated over and over, and as the whole focus on the Blix process confirms, the official motive for this war is Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Preserving UN credibility, ensuring that 12 years of resolutions are not simply ignored, is an important secondary benefit, but disarming Saddam is the chief public purpose.
This alone makes the coming war a new development in international affairs. Pre-emption - hitting a country before it has a chance to hit you - is a fairly novel idea. Hitting the enemy as they break their spears before your very eyes - "We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks," said Blix memorably - may well be a first.
But WMD is not the only stated purpose of the imminent attack. There is also Tony Blair's "moral case", often echoed in Washington, which sees an assault on Baghdad as a war of liberation, rescuing the Iraqi people from a cruel oppressor. This kind of "humanitarian intervention" is a less new concept. Indeed, framed in these terms, a second Gulf conflict would take its place alongside recent actions in East Timor, Kosovo and Somalia as a war fought not in self-defence or to repel invasion but to make life better for those "liberated".
Not many people see the looming Iraq adventure like that; even Blair only dips in and out of such moral talk. But it's worth thinking about all the same. For something profound is changing in our world, and a new Gulf war is part of it. It is the gradual shift away from an idea that has underpinned the international order for centuries, and that its defenders believe to be the bedrock of peace and stability. The idea is sovereignty.
The old thinking, rooted in 1648's Treaty of Westphalia, held independent nations as masters of their own internal affairs. Crudely put, they could do whatever they liked within their own borders. There may have been violations of that principle, with strong countries barging their way into weaker ones. But that at least was the idea. In the 21st century, the principle itself is under attack.
Now foreign policy types in chancelleries across the world are speaking a new language, citing not just sovereign nations' right to be left alone but other nations' "responsibility to protect" their fellow human beings from natural disaster or manmade oppression. The most extreme form of intervention is military but, as policymakers cheerfully explain, "we" intervene in the sovereign affairs of other countries in other ways all the time. Think of the financial diets imposed on developing countries by the doctors of the IMF. Think of election monitors.
What should we make of this steady erosion of sovereignty? For decades the default left position has been to defend state sovereignty, seeing any violation of it as "imperialist" bullying. You can hear that view from much of today's anti-war camp, whose starting point is that Iraq should be left alone and whose slogan is: "The toppling of Saddam is a matter for the Iraqi people alone."
But there may be a mistake here, one that has started with a good instinct - anti-imperialism - and allowed it to pickle into a dogma: the sanctity of state sovereignty. It's a mistake because all too often the sovereignty we defend is not wielded by the people but by their oppressor. Respect for Iraq's sovereignty now, for example, amounts to nothing more noble than a free hand for Saddam. If we make sovereignty into a fetish, regarding it as inviolable, we end up with little more than a dictators' charter.
Does that mean we should simply discard the concept, condemning it as out of place in today's globalised, interdependent world? If we did, we could simply intervene everywhere - wherever oppression and brutality reigned. No tyrant could ever sleep easily again. That may sound like utopian fantasy, but you'd be surprised who believes in it. Tony Blair admits privately that, in an ideal world, he would like to intervene much more, not less. He would get stuck into Zimbabwe, and Burma, if he could. For him regime change in the lands of the unfree is not a menace but an ideal, sadly unrealised.
Most on the left shudder at such talk. Where would it end, they wonder; the world would descend into chaos. But this is an odd argument for progressives and internationalists to make. Surely we would love to live in a world where despots could no longer terrorise with impunity? Surely we would not elevate order and stability into higher goals than that?
No, a better objection to the new galloping spirit of interventionism is not to the ideal itself, but to its likely implementation. The left could doubt whether such meddling would really be driven by altruism rather than great power self-interest. They might suggest that, no matter how benign the initial intentions, things will almost certainly go wrong, eventually making the cure of liberation worse than the disease of oppression. There will be no shortage of historic examples to draw upon. After all, few 19th-century imperialists saw themselves as engaged in a mission of greed and exploitation. Most genuinely believed they were out to do good, improving the lives of those they "liberated". Many of them probably spoke like Tony Blair.
In other words, neither of these extreme poles will do. Neither a sacrosanct sovereignty, inviolable whatever the circumstances, nor Martini interventionism, a free hand to meddle anytime, any place, anywhere. Neither position fits today's world, either as it is or as we would want it to be. Instead, we need a different guide.
That will mean rules, and institutions to enforce them. Much work has been done on the former, none more serious than that of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. That body of notables came up with a rulebook for when action is justified and when it is not. There needs, they said, to be a threat of large scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing; the prime motive of the interveners has to be averting suffering; action has to be multilateral; war must be a last resort and the means proportionate "to the magnitude of the original provocation"; and the consequences of action must not be worse than the consequences of inaction. What strikes you reading that 2001 report today is that an attack on Iraq would meet almost none of those criteria.
As for the institution to do the enforcing, the UN is the obvious candidate. It is deeply problematic that two of the five veto-wielders on that body are serious human rights abusers themselves, but there are solutions to that. (If intervention is blocked in the security council, a demand can always be taken to the general assembly.) The UN may be flawed, but it's the only UN we've got.
As the coming war is about to show once again, we cannot stay out of each other's lives, no matter how much we might like to. What we need is a set of principles telling us when we have to get involved - and how. And the need can never have been more urgent.